If you’re a regular visitor to Athens, or just curious to explore beyond the tourist sights, get your hands on 111 Places in Athens that you Shouldn’t Miss. This insider guide encourages visitors and locals alike to take a closer look at famous monuments and venture into the backstreets to discover city secrets hidden in plain sight. Here are 6 of our favourite spots featured in the book.
Agia Marina Church
A pre-Christian grotto hidden inside a church
Just below the National Observatory, this large church built in the 1920s is dedicated to Saint Marina, a 15-year-old maiden who rebuffed a man who wanted her as his bride by telling him her only love was for Christ. Marina challenged her suitor to torture her to test her devotion—and so he did, in a multitude of gruesome ways.
Today, this pretty church, on a peaceful square, sits above a smaller church. In its south-eastern corner is an ancient grotto that was used as a place of worship in the pre-Christian era. Later it functioned as an aqueduct, while today it’s used for baptisms. Fittingly, Marina is the patron saint of pregnant women and children.
Insider tip: Blend into the Thissio neighbourhood’s vibrant café culture at Athinaion Politia, an all-day hangout.
Courtesy: Yannis Varouhakis
Courtesy: Yannis Varouhakis
The tomb of Kallirhoe Parren
Greece’s forgotten suffragette
A tour of the Athens First Cemetery is like a walk through modern Greek history, since most of the country’s leading political and cultural figures are buried here. Guides to the city usually point to sculptor Yannoulis Halepas’ Sleeping Maiden, a marble memorial to an 18-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis. Oddly, there’s nary a mention of Kallirhoe Parren, the woman at her bedside when she died, whose own grave lies a few metres away.
The publisher of a weekly newspaper run entirely by women, Parren campaigned for public education and voting rights to women. She founded the Union for the Emancipation of Women in 1893, which paved the way for Greece’s suffragette movement. Parren died in 1940, 12 years before women were given the right to vote and run for office.
Insider tip: Check out the 5th century B.C. temple of Artemis Agrotera, an open, abandoned excavation on 24 Ardittou Street, a few blocks away.
Eleni Marneri Galerie
A jewellery showroom with a secret below ground
On a tiny street near the Acropolis Museum, Eleni Marneri provides a chic showroom for modern Greek jewellery designers. The building sits above an ancient dwelling, parts of which—including mosaics—are still visible beneath the gallery’s glass floor. Whether made of space-age metals, paper feathers, digital flowers or precious stones, each piece on display is an objet d’art with a singular identity. Jewellery and other works of decorative art are enhanced by wafts of floral fragrances by Santa Maria Novella; the famous Florentine scents and soaps are also sold here.
Insider tip: A few doors down is Solebike, which offers audio-tours of ancient and modern Athens on electric bicycles.
Courtesy: Yannis Varouhakis
Courtesy: Yannis Varouhakis
Katakouzenos House Museum
A love story in a literary salon
Angelos and Leto Katakouzenos were well-born and beautiful; they were also cultivated, idealists, patriots and polyglots. He was a French-trained psychiatrist and intellectual; she was a writer. Their circle of friends included Albert Camus, William Faulkner, and Hubert Humphrey, in addition to almost every Greek artist and poet active between the 1930s and the 1980s. A visit to their apartment, now a small museum, is a trip back to that golden era. With the hosts ‘temporarily absent’, you can poke around their belongings. The portraits and drawings by Chagall, Picasso, Ghika, and Tsarouchis were all gifts, as were the many signed books.
Curator Sophia Peloponnisiou compares the apartment to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, but “that was fiction, the objects acquired to tell a love story he invented. While this was real.”
Insider tip: The Katakouzenos House Museum hosts occasional lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and performances that keep its owners’ literary salon and spirit alive.
Menandrou Street
A spicy, multicultural melting pot
Between Psirri and Omonia Square is a downtown district called Gerani that feels like a different country. At its heart is colourful Menandrou Street, where you’ll find Pakistani barber shops offering neck-cracking head massages, Chinese clothing emporiums, and tiny Asian grocers bedecked with chillies and filled with an abundance of exotic vegetables. In-the-know foodies venture here to pick up freshly ground spices, grab a kebab or falafel, or dine on home-cooked Asian meals that cost next to nothing. Apart from being a lively place of trade, the street is a microcosm of the multicultural communities that have infused—and essentially restructured—Athens over the last 20 years.
Insider tip: On nearby Anaxagoras Street, Romantso is a cultural centre, creative incubator and café-bar that brings hipster cool to the area’s edgy grit.
Courtesy: Yannis Varouhakis
Courtesy: Yannis Varouhakis
The Vespasianae
Public toilets built by the Romans
At the northern entrance to the Roman Agora, look for the outline of a rectangular building with a marble floor and a raised bench with two holes in it—all that remains of the 68 public latrines that once stood here. The walled structure originally had an atrium for ventilation and light. Running water was channelled into a drain connected to the sewers. The toilets offered seclusion from passers-by but hardly privacy: the seats were only 56 centimetres apart.
Non-existent until the Romans took over Athens, public loos were de rigueur in every Roman city. The emperor Vespasian is credited with introducing them in AD 74 and then taxing their use to fund ambitious projects, including the Colosseum.
Insider tip: Also in the Roman Agora, the recently restored Fethiye Mosque, built by the Ottomans, often hosts interesting exhibitions.